


a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, complete and utter misery

by river_of_words



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic, i think? i mean i made up the sickness idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:49:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25710892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/river_of_words/pseuds/river_of_words
Summary: The Doctor gets an illness that messes with her Timelord Time Sense.Set somewhere between Resolution and Spyfall.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Comments: 21
Kudos: 76





	1. Chapter 1

In hindsight she should’ve caught it weeks earlier. That miscalculation at New Year’s with the Dalek, that should’ve been an obvious sign. The difficulty she had last week translating the calendar of the planet they’d landed on into the Gregorian calendar for Yaz, Ryan, and Graham to understand? That should have been a dead giveaway. She thought they were just being dense but turns out _she_ was being dense. But to be fair, who would suspect themself of having an illness that only one species in all of time and space is susceptible to, when they hadn’t even been in contact with that species for at least a... a... a long time!

The Doctor frowns in annoyance at her failing ability to conceptualise concrete periods of time. Where did she even pick up time flu? Can humans be carriers? She’s got to get the fam home before it gets worse. How long after the first symptoms that the temporal disorientation sets in? She doesn’t remember. But she’s already having trouble with calendars so there’s not much time.

She jumps up and walks into the Tardis, leaving the others outside on the pink grass in the quiet afternoon they’d been having, parked on a hill on an alien planet that’s all shades of purple and pink, and starts setting the coordinates for Sheffield. The Tardis lights up red and loud in alarm.

“Whoa,” Ryan says, apparently having got restless and followed her inside. “What’s going on?"

“Nothing,” the Doctor says, not looking up from the controls.

Ryan points at the red lights flashing around the console room. “What’s that then?”

She glances at him briefly. “Nothing, Tardis is in a mood.”

_you’re not going to drive like this_

It’s half a question and half a warning. “I can drive just fine!” she says, turning on the helmic regulator.

“Why is your driving ability in question?” Graham asks, walking in, dragging his foldable beach chair behind him like he’s already resigned himself to the idea that the calmness of the afternoon was a temporary indulgence and too good to stay true for very long. “Aside from the obvious.”

“Oh, everyone’s a critic,” she rolls her eyes. “If you don’t like my driving you’re welcome to take the bus. Oh, wait.” She shoots Graham a pointed look before returning her attention to the console. “And it isn’t. The Tardis is just being annoying.” She forcefully flips a lever to prove her point and then looks up at Graham and Ryan and Yaz walking in to see what the commotion is about. “What do you guys think? Time to check in at home? It’s been a few...” she trails off, turning back to the console, pretending to be distracted by the controls while she tries to remember what the correct unit of time is. Years maybe?

“What?” Yaz joins her at the console. “We’re going home?”

“Are you kicking us out?” Ryan asks, taken aback.

“No!” The Doctor leaves the controls alone at once and looks at him. “Of course not, Ryan!” Please don’t ever think that. “I just thought a day at home might be nice. Say hi to the neighbours! Water your plants.”

She presses one last button and pulls the dematerialisation lever and nothing happens.

“Tardis seems to disagree,” Graham says.

“Yes, she does, doesn’t she,” the Doctor mutters.

“Why are you taking us home?” Yaz asks. “And why isn’t the Tardis taking off?”

“Umm,” she hesitates, looking back and forth between their curious, confused, suspicious faces. Yaz raises her eyebrows expectantly. She’s taken too much time to answer, they’re never going to believe a lie now. “Two questions, one answer, it’s efficient I suppose,” she mumbles, looking away. “It’s because...” she crosses her arms, keeping her eyes on the console. “Because I’m, I’m sick.”

“What?” Yaz is beside her in one step, instantly worried.

“Nothing serious!” she holds up her hands in surrender, no wait, reassurance, that’s the one. “It’s just, just like the flu.”

“The flu kills half a million people a year,” Yaz says, crossing her arms.

“Okay! Bad example. Not like the flu then. Definitely not. What’s an unpleasant but ultimately harmless human illness?” She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s not dangerous.”

“Is it contagious?” Ryan asks. “Is that why you’re taking us home?”

“It’s not contagious. Not for you.”

“You don’t look sick,” he says, eyeing her.

“It’s not that bad yet. Which is why I need to take you guys home before I can’t fly the Tardis anymore.” She yanks the dematerialisation lever again. Without result.

“You can’t fly when you’re sick?” Yaz asks.

“Not with this illness.” She looks at their confused faces and adds, “It messes with your sense of time.”

“You mean it makes it feel like time goes slower? Because I think that might just be any illness,” Ryan says.

“No,” she smiles at him, “Time– My– Where I come from, we experience time differently than you, humans.”

“I don’t get it,” Graham says.

“It’s complicated and I’ll explain it all later but now–” she bounces into action again, flipping the manual override on the console to try and get around the Tardis’s stubbornness. “I have to get you guys back home before we’re stuck here for–” months... minutes... millennia? One of those.

“But you can’t fly the Tardis?” Yaz asks, sounding uncertain.

The Doctor stops her swirling around the console to stop in front of Yaz and look her in the eye. “Yes, I _can._ ” She turns to glare at the Tardis. “If we leave _now._ ”

The lights around the room flash warningly.

“Those flashing red warning lights are really convincing me of the safety of that plan,” Graham says, deadpan. “Those loud alarms, too!”

“If it’s not safe to fly, we don’t mind staying here until you’re better,” Yaz says, because of course she does.

The Doctor snorts incredulously. “You will!”

“No, we won’t,” Ryan decides, stepping forward to stand beside Yaz. “Right, Graham?”

“That’s right,” Graham nods, joining them.

Oh how sweet they are. How sweet and how _exasperatingly stubborn_! The Doctor throws her hands up in frustration. “Listen, I can just drop you off at home! Come back for you tomorrow! This–” she gestures to the landscape outside the Tardis doors, “–is nice for an afternoon but there’s nothing to do here! You’ll be stuck in the Tardis for...” days? Decades? She gives up. “A while! And I won’t be good company.” She’s not sure she _wants_ the company.

“It’s fine,” Yaz says, “we can take care of you.”

Ah! Another thing she doesn’t want. She chews the inside of her mouth and doesn’t respond while she subtly tries to find a way around the nonfunctional dematerialisation lever.

_won’t work. i’m not letting you fly like this._

“Doctor?” Yaz prompts.

_past-future confusion, inability to translate abstract temporal constructs into concrete calendar units, next you’re going to lose your time sense completely and i don’t want to be in the vortex when that happens. do you?_

“What did you do, eat a medical textbook?” she grumbles at the Tardis. “And anyway, you can help.”

_i can help, sure. i can’t safely land three humans on my own with a pilot that can’t tell the difference between **now** and **later**!_

The Doctor wiggles the zigzagplotter stubbornly. “I still can!”

“You’re not talking to _us_ , right?” Ryan asks.

The Doctor looks at him absently, head still in the argument she’s trying to win. “No, no, sorry. Just, wait–” She holds up a hand, shushing him.

_you still can now but you won’t be able to in a moment. you don’t let someone with time flu anywhere near a tardis._

“That’s...” she glances up at the three humans, “ _you-know-whose_ rules,” she mutters, still adjusting controls to try and find a way to take off without the Tardis permission.

_time lords do have some good rules about some things sometimes_

“They really don’t!”

_i’m not letting you crash with the kids in the backseat,_ the Tardis says slowly and clearly and that makes the Doctor stop and look up. At Yaz’s eagerness to help, at Ryan’s loyalty, at Graham’s uncompromising stoicism. She lets out a long sigh. “ _Fine,_ ” she says to the four of them, stepping away from the console, hands up in surrender. This is going to be fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello im back after, like 2 weeks? felt longer. got distracted by tumblr. wrote a BUNCH of meta, here if youre interested:  
> https://you-have-to-use-your-imagination.tumblr.com/ramblythoughts  
> theres actually some stuff thats sorta interesting? stuff where i started writing and then halfway through was like 'wait im onto something here' like how the doctor's concept of 'growing up' means 'not doing war crimes'? never caught that before. it's really visible in day of the doctor and throughout 12's entire run.
> 
> anyway!  
> i wanted to play in the sandbox that is the doctor's timey wimey sense so i wrote this. had a lot of fun! ive divided it into chapters because it felt a more natural way to read it. like the tardis/doctor fic i wrote was about the same length as this but that felt like it should be read as one thing. this i broke up. idk. but im posting it all at once. 
> 
> also, because apparently im now just getting in a habit of writing the doctor and the tardis in this particular way, and not really explaining it in this fic: all the lowercaps italic sentences is the tardis communicating telepathically. italics words within other sentences is not the tardis. just the lines that start at the beginning and are all lowercaps and italics. thats the tardis talking. okay. maybe that was clear, just wanted to be sure. 
> 
> also also, if you wanna be really sweet let me know what you thought? comments put food on the table. no they dont. but they put endorphins in the brain and thats almost as important


	2. Chapter 2

“So what’s this illness like then?” Yaz asks as she and the Doctor take a last walk through the purple landscape before the temporal disorientation symptoms set in and the orbit of this planet is going to feel like sandpaper in the Doctor’s brain. She can already feel it starting to chafe at the edges.

“You said it was like the flu?”

“I was comparing for severity, not symptoms. Also apparently I got that comparison wrong.”

“So it’s not like the flu?”

“I call it time flu because it works as a translation of the proper name but no it’s not like the flu. It’s not a virus, it’s a bacteria. And it doesn’t infect your respiratory system, it goes after your...”

“Your sense of time,” Yaz says, trying to put it together.

“Yeah.”

“You said that, but I don’t know what that means.”

The Doctor pauses to pick one of the orange flowers that are growing in bunches all around them. “The way you experience time, it’s linear, it’s...” a flower stalk snaps between her fingers, “solid.” She stands up to hand one of the flowers to Yaz. “Time’s not really like that. It’s more of a...” her gaze drifts to Yaz’s face. She’s tried to explain this so many times to so many humans, she rarely does a decent job. “A mesh of some kind of very fine material.” They start walking again, the Doctor absently picking apart the fibres in the flower stalk as she tries to visualise the enormity of what Time is to her, to her experience of the universe. “Layers and layers of interweaving threads. Like... like the ruffles in petticoats!” She looks at Yaz triumphantly.

“Time is like a petticoat?” Yaz says, with a surprised laugh at the image.

“It’s not the worst analogy I’ve ever made,” the Doctor shrugs. “You’ve got the fine threads making up each layer, easily breakable on their own but you won’t notice a couple of small rips because the entire network of them holds it together. I’m assuming, I’ve never actually worn one.”

Yaz shrugs. “Me either, but it works as an image.”

The Doctor nods, encouraged. “And you’ve got the different layers, all stacked on top of each other. You can feel the underlying layers of fabric if you touch the one at the top. That’s different timelines.” She looks at the poor flower in her hand, mercilessly pulled apart while she was distracted. “Whoops.”

“Different timelines?” Yaz asks, “So the multiverse theory is true?”

The Doctor snorts. “I don’t think we have the time for me to explain to you all the ways humans in the twenty-first century got time wrong and how you got it right, so yes, for now, assume the multiverse theory is true.”

Yaz finishes weaving the flower the Doctor gave her into her braid. “Okay so, what does that mean for your time... illness?” At the Doctor’s blank look, she adds, “What are the symptoms?”

That’s something the Doctor can answer. “It goes in stages. The symptoms don’t all happen at the same time but follow each other up as your time sense gets progressively more affected. First you lose the ability to differentiate between past and future–”

“Check,” Yaz says immediately.

The Doctor looks up at her, surprised. “What?”

“You’ve been doing that. Mixing up what we have done and are planning on doing. For a while actually. A couple of weeks?" She gives the Doctor a slightly disquieted look. "We just thought you were tired."

She squints at Yaz. She _had_ been doing that. She hadn’t realised the others had noticed though.

“What’s the next stage?”

“Right, uh, you lose the ability to translate an inherent understanding of time into concrete calendar units.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t understand time like you do, like most people in the universe do, in terms of the calendar you use. It’s more... instinctive for me. Normally I translate that instinctive sense of time into whatever calendar is the most practical at the time.”

Yaz nods her understanding. “That’s how you knew how many Earth days had passed while we were on that planet with the eternal day a while back?”

“It wasn’t _eternal–_ ”

“ _Long_ , whatever!” Yaz cuts her off, not about to let her derail the conversation. The Doctor presses her lips together.

“Yes, that’s how I knew how many days had passed," she murmurs, feeling chastised.

“And this illness makes you unable to do that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, that’s two out of two, how many stages are there?”

The Doctor stops walking and slowly turns to Yaz, mouth open. “How do you know that?”

Yaz raises her eyebrows like it’s obvious. “You haven’t named a single unit of time all day. You keep trailing off or redirecting your sentences around them.”

The Doctor closes her mouth. “Nothing gets past you, does it, Yaz?”

Yaz lifts her chin a little. “Nope. What’s the next stage?” she asks as she resumes walking with a bounce in her step. The Doctor quickly catches up with her.

“You lose your sense of time completely for a bit before it gets twisted all inside out. That’s the worst part.”

Yaz is quiet for a couple of meters, looking like she’s thinking very hard. Then she gives it up and turns to the Doctor. “I’m trying really hard to imagine what a time sense feels like but I just don’t know. What does it mean for it to go inside out?”

They walk in silence for a bit while the Doctor tries to come up with a way to describe what a time sense feels like. What a _sick_ time sense feels like. She moves her head from side to side slowly, feeling the edges of where time is starting to grate.

“Doctor?” Yaz asks tentatively, “you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she rubs her face, “just trying to find words. Never tried to describe it before. It’s a bit like balance I think.”

“Balance?”

“You know, the vestibular system.” She jumps in demonstration. “How you orient yourself in space.”

Yaz’s face lights up in recognition. “Oh, the ear thing!”

“The ear thing!” The Doctor grins. “The way the vestibular system in humans makes you able to orient yourself in space, we have a similar thing to orient ourselves in time.”

“But that works with a sort of liquid doesn’t it? I can understand how movement in space can make a liquid move but how does that work for time?”

“I don’t know.”

“ _You_ _don’t know?_ ”

“I’m not a biologist, am I!”

Yaz snorts. “Could’ve fooled me.”

The Doctor feels Yaz’s eyes on her as she crouches to pick another couple of flowers. When Yaz starts talking again, her voice sounds different, a bit more serious, a bit uncertain, like she’s wading in deeper waters than she usually dares to go. “How do you know all that stuff about humans, but not about...” she trails off. The Doctor turns around to look at her, keeping her face carefully neutral. “Not about what?” Her voice is a bit lower than she meant it to be.

Yaz jolts back to herself, like she suddenly realised she was staring. She crouches down too, picking flowers, avoiding the Doctor’s eyes. “Can I ask, what species of alien are you?”

The Doctor watches Yaz studiously keep her eyes on the flowers, pink that matches the grass creeping up her cheeks like she’s embarrassed about asking a personal question. Which, honestly, finally someone who treats that kind of question with the appropriate restraint! Humans never appreciate the sort of personal questions they just throw out like it’s nothing! Yaz glances at her briefly when she doesn’t immediately respond. “Don’t mean to be too intimate.”

“Well, it _is_ a bit of a personal question.”

That snaps Yaz out of her uncharacteristic shyness. She stands up and looks at the Doctor, indignant. “You know what species I am!”

The Doctor stands up too. “Right, but, humans, that’s a cool species. That’s something to be proud of! My species–” she shrugs and turns away from Yaz, “–nothing to be proud of. Just, boring really! Little backwater corner of the universe. The name wouldn’t even mean anything to you.” She turns around to see if she’s convinced Yaz.

Yaz eyes her. “But you look human.”

The Doctor shakes her head. “Lots of organisms develop this basic template. Front-facing eyes, hands free to make stuff. Useful for building a civilisation. Although...” she looks at her hands full of flowers, “never seems quite enough.” She turns to Yaz. “Don’t you wish you had more hands sometimes?”

“Not really." Yaz studies her face for a moment, frowning slightly. “Shall we go back to the Tardis?”

“Yes,” the Doctor nods. The movement of the planet beneath is getting harder to ignore with every step. The unrestrained Time of the galaxy spinning around them starting to become crushing. Yaz probably noticed. “Let’s go back.” Maybe it’s not so bad to have them here with her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is basically a chapter of exposition isnt it. oops  
> and i still dont think i actually explained the stuff that you need to understand later in chapter 3 and 4. double oops  
> but theres also a bit of yaz having a crush in here so thats nice  
> yaz, having Feelings, reconsidering her entire sexuality: "but.... you look.... human....?" (what does it mean when she looks human but isnt oh god i need more intel) "what...... kind of Species.... are you? if thats not toO INTIMATE! dont mean to be forward! and asSUME THINGS!" (oh god im assumign things)
> 
> okay so i was imagining this stuff with the time sense because i cant really imagine what feeling time in the way the doctor possibly might would feel like but i stumbled across the balance analogy and i really liked it! so the symptoms are sort of written from that perspective, like, in an earlier draft yaz asked the doctor somewhere in this chapter like "so if it's like balance, do you get dizzy?" and the doctor was like "in 4 dimensions" so thats basically where im coming from with the symptoms in this fic. the vestibular system but make it Timey.
> 
> i did no research for this except reading the wikipedia articles for vestibular system and virus and bacteria (and changing the cause of the illness to a bacteria instead of a virus because of that, as if thats gonna make the whole thing more scientifically Correct) but anyway the wikipedia for vestibular system made me tear up with the beauty and horror of nature. it happens  
> "The brain uses information from the vestibular system in the head and from proprioception throughout the body to enable the mammal to understand its body's dynamics and kinematics (including its position and acceleration) from moment to moment." that just overwhelms me with the complexity and fragility and beauty of the human body what can i say. that it has evolved to do that! these little tubes in your ear with some stuff in them that moves when you move your head, making you able to orient yourself in space! in a series of layers of complex systems making you able to conceive of yourself as a body in space! knowing where your arms and legs and stuff are, knowing they ARE your arms and legs. and then even further, making you able to conceive of yourself as a person! and your body as your body and a person! in a space! it's, im, watch me cry at a wikipedia article at 4 in the afternoon.
> 
> also, shouldn't the doctor probably know how her timey organ works? if even just the basics? probably. but i dont. so im headcanoning she knows more about the human body than she does gallifreyan/timelord bodies. i would not be surprised about that
> 
> also also, isnt it kinda weird that 'the doctor's fam' is one character tag? seems disrespectful to them. although i do write or talk about them as a unit fairly often, and it is quicker, theyre still separate people? but anyway. sometimes it's just the doctor vs the doctor's fam isnt it. especially when i have my hands on the keyboard. not in this though. this isnt too angsty. nobodys fighting in this. still before spyfall.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s not long after they get back to the Tardis that the Doctor's time sense abandons her and she has to grudgingly admit the Tardis was probably right not letting her fly. They’ve set up a picnic table on the pink grass in front of the Tardis and they’re setting up a board game (“Funzo! The Craziest Board Game of 1973!” – “In _what_ universe?” – “I’ve never heard of this.” – “Just try it!”) when suddenly it’s like someone without warning shuts off all the lights in the Doctor’s head. She blinks involuntarily, trying to clear her vision, but it isn’t working. Because it’s not her vision that’s gone dark.

Yaz catches her wide blinking eyes and absent gaze from across the table and raises a questioning eyebrow. The Doctor smiles at her reassuringly, even though she’s the one who mostly needs the reassurance right now.

“I’ve lost my sense of time.” She’d forgotten how awful this is. Like not hearing your own heartbeat. Like not hearing the heartbeat of the universe.

Graham looks up from his task of distributing tokens.

Ryan asks, “You okay?”

“Yes, yes,” she waves their concern away. “It’s not that bad.” If she pretends the dread she’s feeling isn’t there, maybe it’ll simply go away. “Let’s play!”

But it’s hard to concentrate. She keeps involuntarily rubbing at her eyes to try and clear them, and it feels like she can’t hear the others even though she understands what they’re saying perfectly and she knows there’s nothing wrong with her hearing. It’s just the absence of information from that _other_ sense, so difficult to pinpoint or define, making her restless and jumpy. She has to keep turning around to check there’s no one behind her. There isn’t. And if there was, Yaz at the opposite side of the table would see them approach. The problem isn’t that she can’t see what’s behind her, it’s that she can’t feel what’s _after_ her, and _before_ , and everything else.

When she snaps at Ryan for accidentally breaking a rule, (“It’s really not that complicated Ryan!”), Graham stops the game.

“You need to go lie down.”

“I don’t _need_ to do _anything_ , Graham,” she sneers, pressing her hands over her ears like if she’s actually muffling the sound, the feeling of not being able to hear will be less grating. “Ugh, how do you people _cope._ It’s disgusting.”

“What would help?” Yaz asks, being perfectly sweet and understanding, even though she’s being a jerk to them.

“I don’t know,” the Doctor groans, squeezing her eyes shut. The thrum of her blood in her ears doing nothing to block out the disconcerting silence coming from the one sense that she can’t physically shut. She shudders and swats the air behind her. “I feel like there’s someone behind me.”

“There’s no one here but us,” Ryan reassures her.

“I _know!_ I know that, but I can’t _see._ ”

“You can’t see?” Yaz asks, gently concerned.

No, no, they’re not understanding. “I can see _with my eyes_ , I can’t see with–” she waves her hands in frustration at the lack of available vocabulary in English for this sort of thing. “I can’t _see_ ,” she insists, which doesn’t really clarify anything for them. She can see it on their faces. “Nevermind!” she gets up and goes to go inside the Tardis but recoils at the doorstep and stumbles. The Tardis feels dead.

_i’m not dead, silly, don't panic  
_

Right, right. Of course she's not dead. She just can't feel her right now. The Tardis is fine. The Tardis is fine.

She notices a hand on her back. Someone’s caught her, stopped her from falling over when she stumbled. Graham. She pulls away from him and he cautiously lets her.

“Ryan?” Graham says.

“Got it.”

He jumps up and disappears into the Tardis.

“Got what? What’s he doing?”

“Yaz?”

“Yep.”

Yaz is by her side in an instant and as she’s being guided into the Tardis and out of the console room by the helpful (intrusive) hands of Graham and Yaz, Graham explains that when Ryan was sick, Grace would wrap him in a blanket, put him on the couch, give him chicken soup and read to him until he was able to fall asleep. So that’s what they’re going to inflict on her now. Although, actually, that might not be the worst possible thing in the world.

As Graham makes a detour to the kitchen to make tea and/or presumably chicken soup – she doesn't think they have a chicken but she hasn’t been in the kitchen in a while – the Doctor and Yaz follow the corridor to wherever the Tardis is taking them.

“How’re you feeling?” Yaz asks.

“Fine.” She shakes Yaz’s hand off her arm in a way that hopefully doesn’t come across as rude, or ungrateful, or like she doesn’t want her here. Yaz doesn’t mention it.

“Okay, one,” Yaz’s voice drops a little, becomes a bit more authoritative, “don’t lie. And two, that’s not what I meant.” Soft and empathetic again, “What does it feel like?”

“ _BAD_ ,” the Doctor says almost before Yaz has finished talking. Yaz gives her an exasperated look. She looks down, slightly ashamed of herself, Yaz is trying to help, she should probably not squander all her goodwill on the first day.

“It feels like...” she thinks, considering the way she feels like she’s tilting, like she tripped and fell but can’t stop falling even when she’s hit the floor, like she wants to steady herself against the wall but the wall is the fabric of space-time, like she’s out of sync with the universe. “It feels like standing on one leg with your eyes closed.”

She stops walking as she suddenly realises Yaz is no longer beside her. She looks back to find Yaz standing on one leg with her eyes closed, wobbling wildly. She puts her foot down and opens her eyes when she almost falls over.

“It’s really hard.”

The Doctor can’t help but smile at her. “I can stand,” she elaborates. “I can walk just fine. I just feel– destabilised, like–”

“You _can’t see_ ,” Yaz finishes, penny dropping.

The Doctor nods and rubs at her eyes. She wants to sit down. A door to their right swings open.

The Tardis has led them to a nice comfortable living room full of soft worn sofas and friendly weathered bookshelves and a warm welcoming fire. Yaz sits her down in a corner of a sofa but she quickly realises she’s going to be looking over her shoulder the whole time if she stays there so she slides to the foor and sits with her back against the sofa. Knees to her chest. Yaz finds some blankets from somewhere and gives her one and Graham enters with tea and Ryan with a book and they all settle in. Ryan begins to read and the Doctor puts her head on her folded arms on her knees and tries to focus on the story and forget about the overwhelming lack of information around her.

* * *

She must have fallen asleep at some point because she wakes up, on the sofa, under a blanket, and immediately wishes she hadn’t because her time sense is back and it’s being strangled to death by some stupid little bacteria. An entire century is being spun around her like sugar around a stick in a candy floss machine. Good news is that she understands what a century is again. Bad news is that she wishes she didn’t. She groans and pulls the blanket over her head, which doesn’t really help anything.

“Hello,” sounds a quiet voice from across the room. She peeks her head out from under the blanket and peers over the coffee table at the vaguely human shape sitting in a chair.

“Graham?”

“Yes, Ryan and Yaz have gone to bed.”

She has the vague intention to ask how long it’s been but thinking about time is making her dizzy so she doesn’t. “You should go to bed too.”

“I’m alright here,” he whispers, voice gentle and soft.

“No point just sitting there,” she protests, sitting up a bit, “go to bed.”

“Wanted to keep an eye on you.”

She scoffs. “Honestly. You guys. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m f–” she cuts herself off with a gasp of pain as she feels this planet’s year 3417 gets smashed into its year 1295 and grinded up into mush. She presses her head into the sofa and closes her eyes and silently begs it to stop.

She hears the squeak of the chair when Graham stands up and the weight on the sofa as she sits down next to her but she doesn’t open her eyes. He doesn’t touch her, which is a mercy. When the years have stopped smushing into each other and forming some kind of abominable frankenyear, she opens her eyes and stares right in the face of Graham watching her.

“I’m fine _,_ ” her voice comes out a bit more hoarse than she would have liked it to. She hedges in response to his skeptical look. “Okay, it hurts a _bit_. I’ve had worse. I’m just going to sleep it off.”

“Sure?”

“I hope so.” Though she’s quickly losing faith in that blissful possibility. Now that she’s awake, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to fall asleep again.

“This is the most I’ve ever seen you sleep.”

She sits up, letting the blanket crumple in her lap. “What have you been doing while you’ve been sat there babysitting me?”

Graham ignores her gibe because he’s a decent person and points at the book lying on the table. She reads the title.

“Didn’t realise you were one for philosophy.”

He gestures to the bookshelves hidden in the shadows on the other side of the room. “That’s most of what’s here.”

“Oh, is this the philosophy room?”

“Apparently so.”

“Hm.” The Doctor lets her gaze drift over the abandoned pillows and blankets scattered on the chairs and sofas, and the vaguely sinister shadows the fire casts on them. “Don’t think I’m in the mood for philosophy right now.” She looks at Graham. “You should go to bed”

“You gonna be okay?”

“Of course.” She stands up. “I’ll go...” she looks around the room slowly until her eyes find the door, “find my bedroom...” she trails off, trying to remember if she knows where her bedroom is. Does she have a bedroom? Yes, she does. Somewhere. Might have been redecorated since the last time she saw it.

“I’ll walk with you.”

They walk through corridors until they find a door that’s probably her bedroom (at least that's what she tells Graham) and she goes inside (her decidedly not-bedroom) and waits for Graham to leave before promptly getting out again to continue wandering the hallways until the sun comes up, slowly feeling her time sense twist itself inside out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had so much fun imagining what the different symptoms of this uncreatively-named disease i made up would feel like.  
> the sentence about the years mushing into each other is annoying though. because like, it's clunky, it doesnt read right, but if i just put a number, youre gonna imagine that earth year. and, idk, then youre gonna be like, well how do you feel earth doing that youre not on earth. and like, which calendar? if i just say a number like 1295, it doesnt mean anything, unless it's earth. because we dont have any concept of either history or calendar (orbit time) of another planet. i shot myself in the foot with that, setting this on another planet.
> 
> because the image is cool, idk. the idea of, if you're someone who can like, feel time in that way, to Feel like 1993 grind against 436 like nails on a chalkboard, or like, idk, i was imagining something soft that would kinda disintegrate into each other. like smearing raw minced meat against a brick wall or something. yikes. gross. maybe i shouldve written that down. you know it's good writing when you have to explain it in the chapter notes (/sarcasm)  
> yeah this is decidedly not my best writing, but i had so much fun with the concept!
> 
> also, if youre like, what is funzo, it's a reference to wolf 359 the audiodrama podcast, because i was relistening last week and couldnt resist. also because i couldnt think what would be a game they could be playing (last time i wanted to have them play a game, the games i came up with kept not really existing in england? this game doesnt exist anywhere so thats good) also, the idea of the doctor liking funzo is actually so funny. it's a game specifically designed to be as horrible as possible to play. the characters who play it in the podcast have an awful time. it has a million way too convoluted rules, like:
> 
> MAXWELL: Hidden inwardness is a blue card, you can only play those at the start of a turn.  
> MINKOWSKI: No no, it's a blue sapphire card, I thought you could play those at any point.  
> HERA: Normally yes, but we're still in the spy phase for another three turns, so sapphire cards can only be played for their secondary effect.  
> MINKOWSKI: Secondary effect?  
> MAXWELL: Yeah, so if I were you I would save that until we get to the next loyalty round.  
> LOVELACE: This game makes NO sense!  
> HERA: Guys, it's really not that complicated. You spin the wheel of ages until you have enough power tokens to get a part of the sunken idol. After that, you just keep going up the Celestial Steps, avoid the secret surveillance network, and make it to Temple of Light with the three Crowns of Wisdom.
> 
> i just have a lot of fun imagining the doctor is the only person in any company that would understand this game AND have fun playing it. their brain is always doing 100 things at once. also, it's very fun to imagine how the doctor came by this game. how it lies in the tardis, lurking, waiting for an unsuspecting companion to go 'hey whats this' during a quiet evening in, and for the doctor's eye to start glimmering with some of that stuff 13 showed when she was making eyes at the cyberium? you know? this game would bring out the doctor's madness a little bit and any companion who has met this game would make sure no one else finds it ever again (but it would be found again eventually because the tardis secretly also loves this game, it's just that they need more than 2 players or they two of them would amuse themselves with this for days)
> 
> also ryan definitely made a blue/blue sapphire card error and the doctor was really mean
> 
> also the doctor is way more open here than i tend to write her but i really didnt have the time for her being evasive here, if i want to write about what the time sense feels like then she has to sometimes say what it feels like! also it's still before spyfall, she was a bit more open. (a BIT, like, a LITTLE bit)
> 
> also "he insults species when he's stressed"


	4. Chapter 4

At one point– No, not a point. Points are too solid and concrete and nothing like that exists anymore. At one chunky bit of the disgusting pit of steaming sludge time has turned into during the night, she finds herself sitting on the floor of the console room with her back against the wall.

The lights are off and they’re a soothing blue and they’re an assaulting orange and they’re each of these potentialities at once and her brain will not decide which. She’s lost the blanket somewhere in the corridors and is sitting on it using it as a pillow and is watching it lying crumpled on the floor a couple of feet away from her. It jumps around as she stares at it. Tiny variations in the percentages of probability having it made fall down in slightly different spots in every timeline that she sat down here. She pulls the blanket over her head to stop having to see it and her head screams against the impossibility of it.

Yaz is the one to find her in the morning, and Ryan walks in first, and Graham’s been up and busy in the kitchen since before either of them were awake and each potentiality dissolves into another as she tries to get enough of a grasp on them to respond to any of them.

“Hey, did you sleep?” Yaz sits down next to her.

Ryan hands her the blanket she left on the floor.

Graham brings them a cup of tea.

The Doctor tries to look at Yaz as she responds to her but Yaz keeps jumping from being on her right to being on her left, or sometimes sitting in front of her just to spice things up a little.

“Yes I slept very well and only just woke up and came in here to sit miserably on the floor with the lights off.”

Ryan snorts. “Don’t know that sarcasm is really your thing,” he says while he flickers from sitting next to her to standing at the console to opening the Tardis doors and letting alien morning light stream in.

“It can be my thing if I want it to,” the Doctor says, trying to keep track of Ryan and startling when he’s suddenly sitting right next to her again, “and will you _sTOP moving around!_ ”

“I’ve been sitting here the whole time,” he says, confused.

She doesn’t respond to that, wearily staring at the open Tardis doors that no one opened. She takes a sip of tea. “This is nice Graham, thanks.”

“I thought we could have breakfast outside,” he says, opening the Tardis doors that were already open and also only just walking into the console room.

The Doctor grimaces. The idea of having to go outside and get buried in the absolute untempered Time of the entire universe while the relative time oasis of the Tardis already hurts this much makes her want to jump off a cliff. “I’m gonna stay inside if you don’t mind.”

“Bit of fresh air will do you good,” Graham says from outside the Tardis setting the table and also from three different places in the room carrying cereal and milk and bread and jam outside.

“Bit of fresh time will not,” the Doctor mutters.

“Does time feel worse outside the Tardis than inside?” Yaz asks, flickering violently, while Ryan gets up to help Graham set the table.

The Doctor presses her face against her knees. She can still feel the timelines that are making Yaz flicker fight each other around her head. “There’s just a lot more of it outside.”

“More time? How’s that possible?”

“I would love to explain it all to you, _some other time_ ,” she says, resisting the urge to grab Yaz and hold her still. It wouldn't make a difference. That’s not how it works.

* * *

She has breakfast with the others, sitting in the Tardis doorway and keeping her arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. As the day goes on, the probabilities of the shifting timelines move to progressively smaller percentages. Her breakfast only shifts between croissants and cereal – making her drop a bowl of milk in her lap – but by dinner a spoonful of soup might be mud, might be a jellyfish, might be a steak knife. She pushes her plate away in dismay.

Yaz looks at it and asks her something but three different sentences clatter out of her mouth at the same time. The Doctor can guess. “It’s not food,” she says, gesturing vaguely at her bowl full of tadpoles, not having the energy to explain. Yaz, Ryan, and Graham are swapping places like they’re playing musical chairs, but at least they’re all still sitting at a table. It could be worse.

It will be worse.

* * *

The next night brings a further drop in what kind of probabilities her brain will accept as probable enough. She sees Yaz getting a phone call from her parents, who found out where she’s been all this time when she said she was working. She sees Ryan getting almost his entire right pinky finger cut off in an accident with a sharp piece of plating beneath the console that she hadn’t reattached properly. She watches Graham's face go white as he picks up a phone call from his doctor and she leaves the room to curse out the universe and slam every door she can find, because it might not be _her_ Graham's timeline but it's _some_ Graham's timeline and he doesn't deserve _that._

She ends up in an intense battle of the wills with her own will when people start knocking on the Tardis door. The probabilities aren’t low enough for people that she believes to be dead, or, say, in a parallel universe, to show up, but people she knows are still out there somewhere. In this universe. With time-spaceships. People who conceivably could end up here. And see her blue box. The probabilities are not unreceptive to those people right now.

It’s not that she’s hallucinating, is the thing! She argues with herself as she frantically paces the console room. If someone’s out there. A certain someone with a Tardis. In the shape of an American diner, say. It’s not that she _isn’t_ actually out there. In one version of events she is, and if the Doctor just opened the door, she could– She freezes, hand hovering over the lock of the Tardis door, breathing fast.

But she wouldn’t be there for very long! If it really is Clara out there, her timeline would just intersect with the Doctor’s for a fraction of a second. Barely long enough to blink. They wouldn’t be able to talk. The Doctor would just see her flicker out of existence. Get replaced by another equally unlikely timeline. It wouldn’t be worth the heartache.

Would it?

It wouldn’t.

You sure?

No, she isn’t.

Another knock on the door. She leans her head against the window, takes a shaky breath. It’s a _chance._ She opens the door. There’s the shifting of air like on a hot day, a whisp of brown hair, the ghost of a voice, and then just the purple night. She slams the door. It wasn’t worth the heartache.

She sits against the door for the rest of the night, letting unacknowledged tears soak her sleeves and ignoring the knocking of whoever else shows up. Whoever else even more unlikely. People who don’t remember her. People who are stuck in parallel universes. People who are dead. She listens to them knocking and she doesn’t open the door. She just hopes this stops before she ends up back in the Time War or something stupid like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i tried to make it clear in the actual text itself but im not sure i succeeded, so explanation of whats going on:  
> i imagine the doctor can like sense all sorts of possible timelines? like, they can sense the probabilities of every possible next thing to happen and can feel those probabilities shift in response to their actions? something like that. i dont actually understand probabilities or like quantum stuff but my headcanon of this is very influenced by this https://archiveofourown.org/works/22348876 super great fic. this entire series is great you should read it. if only just for this:  
> [I’ve never gotten this far with a human
> 
> ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> 
> unless they’re seconds from death
> 
> way to kill the mood]
> 
> but anyway, so if the doctor can feel/see/sense all these timelines that are really close together, like small things that dont really matter are different like a blanket is dropped in a sligthly different spot on the floor, i imagine in normal circumstances, the doctor would be monitoring the timelines that are close to the one theyre acting in, and they can basically act to shift the whole thing into a timeline that is more favourable. which is one of the skills that sees them facing off with a bunch of daleks with nothing but a jammy dodger and live to tell the tale.  
> but with this time... flu (listen, it's not a good name, im not a creative person okay), the Time Organ or whatever loses control of its monitoring and managing of those timelines, so the patient just shifts through increasingly improbable timelines, getting further and further away from their original one. 
> 
> is that how the universe works? definitely not. is it how time works? also no. is it how illnesses work? thats three for three on the no. does it make some kind of scifi-y doctor who-y sense? im not sure but i hope so!  
> also i did not look up ANYTHING lore or "canon" about the timelord biology or how the time sense is supposed to work (or if thats even a canon thing they can do? im not even sure. maybe it's all just headcanon i picked up from fanfic)
> 
> also, like it says in the actual chapter, shes not hallucinating, if shes actually moving through timelines, or if timelines are moving around her, making her involuntarily interact with them, then none of those things that happen ARE NOT HAPPENING. theyre happening somewhere/somewhen/somehow. clara was there in one timeline, the doctor just didnt stay in that timeline long enough to talk to her. thats the worst part of it.   
> and also super scary because like she could land in a super improbable timeline where the time war is happening right here right now, something like that. i think. i mean thats how i wrote it, but im not sure it makes internally consistent sense. it's angsty though
> 
> also, surprise clara angst! (and implied rose, donna, bill) really didnt expect that to happen but it's kinda my favourite part of the whole thing now


	5. Chapter 5

Later, arguably, when the timelines have stopped caring about their likelihood and have decided to just happen all at once, all of them, and she might as well be in the void, All Of Time being functionally no different than None Of Time, she sits on the floor of the console room in the middle of an ocean of unrestrained Time. Happening All At Once.

She rocks back and forth trying to find solid ground in the form of the movement of her own body. A second means nothing but a unit of forward-backward is still measurable in the tensing and relaxing of her muscles and the pressure of her ribs against her thighs as she breathes. Aliveness is not happening in any sort of comprehensible way anymore but it _is_ still happening and that is enough. Time isn’t passing, isn’t going forward or backward or even sideward. It is still, stagnant, infinite. You thought you could run from this?

She screams and falls backwards into Gallifreyan in a last ditch attempt to find something, anything, to hold on to. She starts calling out the things that still exist. _Everything. Nothing. Time_. And in giving them names, draws borders. And in drawing borders, puts an end to infinity. And the end of infinity is the beginning of something like _Now._

Timelines start tearing themselves away from each other like tissues cleaved apart by a butcher’s knife and she’s spat out, gasping and drenched in the lifeblood of the universe, into a reality she shares with her fam.

It takes a frustrating while of Yaz, Ryan, and Graham trying in vain to talk to her before she can make sense of English again. Trying to process a temporally limited language like English while she’s still leaning on Gallifreyan to keep her grasp on time, is a challenge. English tenses don't play well with a Gallifreyan understanding of time. Or with a Gallifreyan understanding of memory, selfhood, identity, that comes with a Gallifreyan understanding of time. There's just no way to make it all fit into the incredibly limited English vocabulary.

* * *

The next day the Doctor is lying sprawled out on the console room floor, feeling good enough to know it’s the next day, and good enough to whine loudly, in English, about how sorry she’s feeling for herself.

_they’re way too nice to you_

“I know!” she laughs out loud, even though no one else can hear the Tardis, or knows what she's responding to. Feeling too grateful and relieved to be quiet about it.

She’s still feeling timelines fight for dominance, but they’re all timelines that vary only very slightly, so it doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Yaz walks into her line of sight and says something, but splits into three while she does, saying three different things at once. The Doctor doesn’t catch any of it.

“Hm?”

“Can I get you anything?” one Yaz asks, solidifying while the other two flicker out of existence.

“Custard cream?”

Yaz gets two for her and two for herself while the Doctor moves to the Tardis doorway and they sit watching the sun set over the purple landscape. The second custard cream turns into a chocolate biscuit which is disappointing but at least still edible so she doesn’t complain.

_you just called it disappointing, that’s complaining_

She rolls her eyes at the Tardis and eats her biscuit. Yaz watches her with a strange sort of intensity, like she’s trying to figure something out. Maybe this isn’t the Yaz she left behind, maybe from Yaz’s perspective she looks slightly different. Uncanny. She stares back at Yaz, studying her face for uncanny differences. Yaz looks fine to her. She swallows the last of her biscuit.

“What is it?”

Yaz gives a little shake of her head, throwing away a thought and picking up another one. “Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes, the worst of it is over, I think.”

“I’m glad,” Yaz says, looking outside at the fading light bouncing off the purple leaves, making long shadows. “Didn’t like seeing you like that,” she mumbles.

The Doctor looks at Yaz but Yaz keeps her gaze carefully on the grass outside.

“Like what?” the Doctor asks gently.

Yaz presses her lips together like she doesn’t want to say it and then quickly glances up to meet the Doctor’s eyes. “In pain.” She winces slightly like the idea of the Doctor in pain, pains _her_.

Something twinges in the Doctor’s chest and she gets what Yaz is feeling. She nudges Yaz’s leg with her knee to get her to look at her again. “Hey. It probably looked worse than it felt.” She smiles reassuringly.

Yaz looks at her but doesn’t smile. “You don’t know what it looked like.”

The Doctor's smile fades. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Any of you. I should’ve–”

“It’s not _your_ fault!” and “You didn’t scare me!” say two Yazzes, taking each other’s places for just a moment. The Doctor isn’t sure which timeline she ends up with, the one with the Yaz that wants her to know she doesn’t blame her or the one with the Yaz that wants her to believe she isn't afraid. They’re close enough together that both things are undoubtedly true for the Yaz sitting in front of her.

“Thank you, Yaz.”

Yaz frowns. “For what?”

“Being here. Being who you are.”

Yaz looks away, a shy little smile playing at the corner of her mouth.

The Doctor stands up, takes a step outside the Tardis doors, a bit more boldly than might've been wise, and turns around, offering Yaz her hand. “Wanna go for a walk?”

Yaz smiles brighter than the alien sun, cheeks more pink than the alien grass, and takes her hand. "There's nothing I'd like more."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then all timelines just get thrown into a big heap and none of them are distinguishable anymore and it's just a steaming pile of time sludge! 
> 
> also. gallifreyan! i love linguistic stuff. dont know a lot about it, but just from experience the stuff your brain can do with two languages (let alone more) is so weird and funny sometimes. i think gallifreyan as a language would have concepts in it that we wouldnt even understand. because timelords could understand concept we dont, so it would be inherent in the language. 
> 
> thanks for reading! i had a lot of fun writing this, exploring the concept of the time sense a bit, so i hope it was enjoyable to read as well.
> 
> comments are very appreciated and you can find me on tumblr here: https://you-have-to-use-your-imagination.tumblr.com/


End file.
